A Brief History of MySQL Replication

Replication has been one of MySQL’s most powerful and relied-upon features since the early days — long before it had things like foreign keys or even subqueries. It’s one of the foundational pillars that made MySQL suitable for large-scale, production use. This blog post walks through how replication evolved over time, and why it remains one of the strongest features in the MySQL ecosystem.

The Beginning (MySQL 3.23 — early 2000s) MySQL introduced statement-based replication (SBR) in version 3.23.15 in May 2000. This was a major milestone: it allowed users to replicate changes from one server (the source, previously called master) to others (replicas, previously slaves) by logging SQL statements executed on the source and replaying them on replicas.